It was one of those mornings. I ran late all morning. One jacket didn’t fit. One sweater looked ridiculous along with a second jacket. I ironed a sweater that kind of worked and hung it on the back of a chair so I wouldn’t spill on it. My husband, who usually stays in bed until after I leave, came out to investigate what sounded like a train wreck in our kitchen. I was wiping up coffee that had spilled out of my thermos that I’d clearly overfilled. He decided to get the hell out of the way. The big dog followed him. The travel coffee cup I poured coffee into didn’t have a top. I poured it into a different one and grabbed my gym bag without unpacking yesterday’s stuff. As I threw on my sweater I noticed a big spill on the front of my shirt. What. The. Hell. I grabbed a Tide stick and within a minute decided it was going to leave a ring. I flew to the bathroom and rinsed out the mark. And then, you guessed it, I had to pee. Geesh. Now I didn’t have time to dry my shirt with a blow dryer. I hopped my way to the front door with a wet shirt front, trying to get my shoe on. The big dog hung out behind my husband until I shut the door behind me.

I had just enough time to get to work. I tossed everything but my phone and coffee in the trunk of my zoom-zoom Mazda hatchback then buckled in and went to start the car. Nothing. What. The. Hell. Turns out I’d tossed my keys into the fray of things already in my trunk and my ignition couldn’t find the key. I made a mental note to clean out the trunk one of these days. Unbuckle, open, find, grab, toss, buckle, start. Double geesh. I thought it was a miracle that I made it through the school cluster of traffic alive. Things were definitely looking up. I pointed the air conditioning vents toward my shirt front and blasted the air, hoping my shirt would be dry by the time I got to work. Freezing in my wet shirt, in heavier-than-normal traffic, with an aggressive Jetta, and four red lights, I pulled into my work parking lot with one minute to spare. One minute to spare! I can’t even begin to guess how that happened considering it took me one hour and fifty-five minutes to get out of my house this morning and the only productive things I did were wash (eight minutes), put rollers in my hair (five minutes to get a comb through it and five to set it), get dressed (forty-one minutes) and toss a WYSIWYG lunch in my bag (two minutes). I started writing this Believe It Will All Work Out little essay in my head as I walked into the office but promptly renamed it Believe in Miracles

After dropping my coffee off at my desk, I casually walked my lunch bag to the fridge and was assembling my breakfast of olives, a cheese stick, and a half an apple when a nice Business Analyst leaned in a little too close and whispered “I don’t think you know this, but you have a big stain on the back of your sweater.” What? Really? That can’t be right. Well, it turns out when I was putting my thermos in my bag, I didn’t wipe off all the big, drippy spills which then dripped down the back of my sweater as it hung on the kitchen chair (so I wouldn’t spill on it). I had to make a decision, tell the nice BA how it happened or let her think that I… H’m. What could she possibly think? That I got shot by a coffee paintball in a Starbucks parking lot? That I bent down to pick something up off the sidewalk under a dripping, rusty gutter? Or that I got pooped on by an incredibly large, stealthy grasshopper who ate at Taco Bell the night before? I decided that changing the subject to menopausal symptoms was the best course of action. It totally worked. She had something she really needed to do, which left me with my olive plate and the realization that I had a jacket in yesterday’s gym bag.

Because my universe was nice enough to provide me with an alternate wardrobe this morning, all should have been right with my world, but my try-to-get-over-it mood was killed by a caustic smell wafting by me. What. The. Hell. I work in an open-office space at a nonprofit organization whose mission is to amplify love, hope, and compassion. They couldn’t afford huge, modular, walled workspaces so they improvised with little kitchen-table-style desks lined up in rows, which leaves no room for privacy or anything. I casually texted my husband to vent about the wafting [the esp part of the text is a story for another time]:

I think I’m so hilarious while texting this that I’m starting to convulse and I can no longer see because of the tears pouring out of my eyes. Wafting guy is pretty sure I’ve received a text message saying my dog was run over by a garbage truck. I refocus and have this brilliant idea to screenshot the hilarious text exchange. I can’t figure out how to get the keypad out of the text exchange, so I decide to Google it, and when I type in “the best way to screen…” Google finishes with “for gonorrhea in an adolescent femal…”. Here is proof that I am not making this up:

I am deep in thought wondering what the hell I could have possibly done to deserve this Google return when the light changes around me. Standing behind me are two lovely Marketing women and the founder of our organization, whom I have never met and in my mind, has advanced to hero worship status. That’s right. The founder. You are also right as you recall I’m wearing a shirt that has been spilled on and Tide-sticked. I am wearing yesterday’s jacket that has a Harley Davidson emblem on the front, which spent the night in my gym bag with my dirty socks and tennis shoes, and I’m holding my phone screenshotting a Google search that suggests I need a gonorrhea screening.

I stopped breathing.

The lovely Marketing women tried their best to convince our founder that I am not homeless and that I am, in fact, the brilliant mastermind behind their successful CRM implementation. She wasn’t buying it. It took four tries to convince her I really was an employee and not a contractor they could give back. Another geesh and a heavy sigh.

Here is hoping that your morning only involved one easy outfit, a perfect cup of coffee and a little privacy. I’m slipping out the back office door for a big breath and a little walk, and silently renaming this essay to I Need a Big Do-The-Hell-Over.

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